


Five Times Timothy Stoker Did Not Fuck His Colleagues and One Time He Did

by lovetincture



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: 5+1 Fic, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Semi-Public Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:54:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29429136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Whoever said sex ruins friendships has never worked for a creepy eldritch boss while trying to stop the apocalypse.Or, a study of Tim Stoker in five relationships.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Tim Stoker, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker, Melanie King & Tim Stoker, Sasha James & Tim Stoker, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Kudos: 20





	Five Times Timothy Stoker Did Not Fuck His Colleagues and One Time He Did

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I love Tim a lot. Like, a weird amount. He might be my favorite character, and that kind of snuck up on me because I love Jon and Elias a whole lot. So anyway, I tried to write a smutty 5+1 fic and instead it turned into a character study.

1\. Sasha

Sure, he’d had a thing with Sasha, but it wasn’t a _thing,_ you know? She had been drunk and horny, and so had he. Plus, he’d always liked Sasha. It was easy to be around her. When you spend days elbow-to-elbow in the stacks together, sorting through endless misfiled statements trying to put things in some semblance of order, you get to know a person. Occasionally she’ll pull one out of the pile and start reading it aloud, putting on her best impression of Jon and making Tim snicker. This is one of those days.

“He’s going to hear you, you know.”

“Oh, he will not.” She tosses the paper back onto the pile. “When did you get to be such a spoilsport?”

“Around the time my rent got raised _again.”_

“You should really move out, you know. You could do better, and I happen to know your roommate’s an arse.”

They clear the first box of statements, and Sasha gets up to toss the empty cardboard shell onto the growing pile and pull down another box from the stack that’s still looming. She sneezes, and Tim pushes the box of Kleenex closer to her side of the table.

“Thanks,” she says. “We really have to do something about all this dust.”

“Sure.” Tim cuts his fingers on the next statement and swears, shaking his hand before bringing his fingers to his mouth to try to suck the sting out of it. “Son of a bitch. And where would I go?”

“Sorry?” Sasha’s only half paying attention, skimming statements and tossing them onto the piles they’ve made—artifacts; artifacts, subcategory: Leitners; apparitions; unnatural phenomena; and unexplained spooky shit. “Go where?”

Tim rolls his eyes. “If I moved, you loser.”

“Oh.” She pauses, thinking. “Could always move in with me?”

“Huh,” he says. It’s not a bad idea. They get on well enough, and sure, he’d had a thing with Sasha, but it wasn’t a _thing._ “Yeah, maybe? I’ll think it over.”

He grabs the next statement and starts reading it aloud, putting on his best pompous-ass archivist voice until Sasha is clutching her sides.

Of course by the time he’s thought it over, it’s already much too late.

  
2\. Martin

Martin isn’t _stupid,_ no matter what Jon says or how he acts sometimes. That’s what makes him so goddamn frustrating.

“I know you see it,” Tim says, probably louder than he should. He might be yelling. He probably shouldn’t take it out on Martin, but what’re they going to do, fire him? “I know you know. Something isn’t right. _This place_ isn’t right, and I don’t know how you can just ignore it. I don’t know how you can live with yourself.”

Martin shrugs, and he suddenly looks so much smaller. He looks tired, Tim thinks. Just as tired as the rest of them.

“I just, I don’t know. Do.”

Tim drags his hand heavily across his face, rubbing hard enough at his eyes to make himself see stars. He’d feel bad for Martin if he could. He just can’t. He doesn’t have it in him anymore.

Tim says, “Yeah, fine. Whatever.”

Martin avoids him for the rest of the day, and Tim can’t say he blames him.

  
3\. Melanie

He’d tried to warn her. He’d told her not to take the job, not to sign the paper, but she did, and now she’s stuck here like the rest of them. She’s remarkably cheery for someone who just signed their life away—probably would’ve fit in really well here in the good old days, actually; before they all realized they’re basically working for evil—but there’s time. She’ll learn.

Melanie invites him for drinks the next time they pass in the hall. “Just Basira, Daisy, and I,” she says. “Wanna come with?”

“No, thanks. Not really in the mood for team bonding with the fellow inmates. Thought I might go home and contemplate _literally anything else.”_

Melanie raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Touchy. You could’ve just said no.”

He could’ve.

Pub night becomes a semi-regular thing again, and Tim doesn’t want to ever go to one, but he can understand why they do it. Melanie doesn’t invite him out again, and Tim can respect that. He might even feel a grudging sense of gratitude.

And then Elias confirms that they are indeed just as fucked as Tim already knew they were, and Melanie stops taking things quite so well. There was shouting and a clock hurled across the room. There are still sprockets and gears littered somewhere beneath one of the desks in Storage Room B and a hell of a dent in the wall.

And then the murder attempts start, and Tim thinks that maybe he likes Melanie after all.

  
4\. Elias

Tim _hates_ Elias. He hates him in a way he didn’t think he was actually capable of hating another human being, with a ferocity that might scare him if he still had any tender places left in which to feel that kind of fear.

As it is, all his soft places have scabbed over, numbed with the kind of constant, relentless dread that had stolen over his life when he wasn’t paying attention. In his worse moments, he likes to try to pinpoint the exact moment when it all went to shit. Was it when he agreed to the lateral transfer that was his appointment as Jon’s assistant? The second the ink had dried on the employment contract he’d signed in Elias’ office? The night that Danny came to him, pale-faced and wide-eyed, dripping tears and muttering nonsense that wouldn’t make sense to Tim for years?

When was the moment that his life stopped being his own and he started dancing like a fucking marionette on a string? He supposes it really doesn’t matter, but sometimes it feels good to twist the knife himself, tired of letting other people do it for him.

If Tim was a different sort of man, these thorny, terrible feelings might bend back on themselves and make a target of his own heart. As it is, Tim’s never been much of one for self-loathing. He’s a far cry from perfection, he knows that. You could write a laundry list of Tim Stoker’s faults, and most of them would probably be right, but Tim _knows_ who he hates, and it isn’t himself.

It’s _fucking_ Elias and his creepy all-knowing, all-seeing bullshit. Christ.

  
5\. Jon

Timothy Stoker wakes up dead.

He knows he’s dead. Knows it as soon as he opens his eyes, looking around himself at the vast, foggy landscape.

In the movies when someone wakes up dead, there’s always a period of confusion. They don’t know what’s happened. They try to visit some old haunts before realizing that no one can see them, and their loved ones have moved on, and nothing is as they remember. As if dying is the same as a knock to the head, and all ghosts are closet amnesiacs.

It’s not like that. Tim remembers exactly what happened. Remembers picking up that ax and charging, remembers Jonathan _fucking_ Sims—

Oh.

Well, it’s not as if he’s got any loved ones to mourn him anyway, right? Maybe he can find Danny somewhere here in this after-place.

Because Tim knows _what_ he is (a ghost, a spirit, a fucking dead guy), but he doesn’t know where he is. The afterlife, maybe, if he had to take a guess. He’d thought it’d be… warmer, somehow. It’s not like he believes in heaven, but he was raised nominally Catholic, and a few things stick whether you want them to or not. There’s no choirs of angels, but he does seem to be _somewhere,_ and he did think the afterlife would be more… place-y.

There’s nothing but a broad, flat expanse of pale grey that somehow stings his eyes. Nothing but fog as far as he can see. This place might go on for miles. It might go on forever.

“Son of a _bitch,”_ he says, and the words echo.

Speak of the fucking devil. He blinks, and there’s Jonathan fucking Sims, and if this is his post-life hallucination, it could at least do him the favor of sucking less.

“What the hell are _you_ doing here?” Tim spits, and Jon blinks rapidly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“This is my afterlife, right?” Tim gets right up in his face because if there’s ever a time for it, it’s here beyond the goddamn grave, and he punctuates each word with a sharp jab to Jon’s bird-bone little sternum. “So what the hell are you doing here?”

“This isn’t—Tim, this isn’t the _afterlife.”_ And it’s not fair, is it? That Jon still sounds so sure of himself, so pompous and exasperated and fucking _annoying_ when Tim is _dead._

“Then where is it?”

“This is…” Jon blows out a breath and stares out at the vast, white wasteland around them. “These are my dreams.”

He sounds sad, and he sounds awed. He sounds wistful in a way that pulls Tim up short so that he has to stare at Jon for a moment to see the pained, small smile twisting his face.

“I don’t understand,” Tim says.

And Jon says, “Look.”

He points, and Tim looks.

All he sees is fog, and he’s about to say so when he starts to see something moving in the mist. It might just be a trick of the light. He’s heard of snow blindness, and if any place without actual snow could induce it, he’d bet it’d be this one—but the movement resolves into shapes, into dim flashes of color that become more vivid the longer he stares at them, as though they’re fading into being.

They’re _people._ Dozens and dozens of people being buried alive, stalked down dark alleyways, boiled flesh from bone as they whimper and gasp and scream. Tim remembers some of these statements. He remembers collating them, paper cuts on fingers and the thick scent of dust in the air. The scene seems to change each time that he blinks without actually moving, an unending reel of horror.

Jon, of course, is rapt. Tim looks at him sideways and sees his lips parted, eyes shining with something that looks very much like want. He looks away as soon as he notices Tim staring.

If it was someone else here with Jon—Martin or maybe even Sasha, the real Sasha—they might have said “I don’t understand” or even “What is this?” or “Explain yourself.” Tim doesn’t say any of those things because he sees, and he _does_ understand. He understands as soon as he recognizes the first victim, a nice woman he’d met following up some story about a haunted sweater. She’d offered him tea.

He can see from Jon’s face that he knows it, too.

“You’re a real bastard, you know that?”

Jon huffs a small, joyless, self-deprecating laugh, and Tim fucking hates him.

“I know,” Jon says.

He really, really doesn’t. Tim can see it in his eyes.

  
1\. Sasha

There was a part of Tim that couldn’t believe he was doing this. It wasn’t like he has an actual rule against fucking coworkers—and it wasn’t like a rule would stop him even if he did—but he tried not to make a habit of things like this. It was one thing to have a one night stand and another to have a one night stand that might fuck up your work friendships forever after.

So, you know, when Sasha had slinked into his lap at the monthly Institute pub night, he’d tried to dissuade her, gently.

“Oh, no, James. I see that look in your eye.”

He’d tried to push her away for all of two seconds, but she’d looped her arms around his neck and smiled so sweetly. Her skin looked like honey under the bar patio’s heating lamps, and she smelled like cinnamon when he tucked his nose into the crook of her neck.

She tilted her head up, and he tilted his head down, and they were the perfect height for this, really. They fit together easily, and that’s the way it always was with Sasha, in everything. Just, easy. One kiss turned into two, slid into how many more, the sound of their lips moving together buried under the faint thump of radio hits and the low chatter of their work mates.

Tim broke away from Sasha’s mouth just long enough to glance behind them. No one was paying them any attention. Everyone from the office was wrapped up in an argument about M.R. James, of all things—fact or fiction. For the most part, he’d found working at the Institute totally normal, but get a pack of spooky nerds on the subject of spooks and apparently it was like chum in the water.

He looked back at Sasha, and her smile curved up at him, a white gleam full of mischief. Tim grinned back. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the tip of her nose, the crest of her cheek, the corner of her mouth. She strained up toward his lips again, and he pulled back at the last possible second, nodding toward the dark alcove at the base of the bar, the little space beneath the stair that was hidden by the shadow cast by the upper patio.

They snuck away from the group like giggling teenagers, still snickering and gasping when their mouths came back together like velcro. It felt like getting away with something. Tim couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun. Their hands were everywhere. Tim got his hands up under Sasha’s shirt, teasing the soft skin there to her gasping approval. She rolled her body up into his hands and raked her nails down his back in return.

Their mouths slid together, hot and wet and, _Christ,_ Sasha was a good kisser. She reached down to unhook his belt, palming him briefly through his pants before dragging his zipper down after.

“Are we going to do it here?” Tim asked against the soft skin of Sasha’s cheek.

“Why? You chicken?”

Tim grinned, wide and wolfish. “Who, me? Never.”

He bit lightly at Sasha’s earlobe, and she shivered. _“Good._ You talk a good game, Stoker. I expect to see some hustle.”

He laughed. He pushed her skirt up and tugged her underwear to the side, and oh, it turned out they were the perfect height for this too. She was dripping wet, and he shuddered as he sank into her. She groaned, her head thumping back against the ivy-covered wall.

“Shh,” he whispered into her mouth, hitching her leg up higher and setting a quick, rolling rhythm.

“They’re— _ah!—_ not going to hear us. The literal walking dead couldn’t drag them away from that conversation.” She sighed as he found her clit with his fingers and started rubbing slow circles in time with his thrusting hips. “Oh, that’s nice. Besides,” she said, mischief still dancing in her eyes that looked so dark by the light of the moon. “Bunch of nerds probably wouldn’t know what they were hearing anyway.”

He laughed and fucked her, and it was the best night Tim had had in a long time.

He thought he was going to like this new job.

**Author's Note:**

> Come scream about these characters with me and look at pictures of my garden on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
